Life & Wisdom Quote by John Burroughs

Burroughs draws a bright, almost prosecutorial line between artful perception and outright self-deception. “Treat your facts with imagination” grants the writer (or naturalist, which Burroughs also was) permission to shape experience: to choose the telling detail, to animate a scene, to make the real feel freshly seen. Imagination here is an instrument, not an alibi. It’s the difference between a field note rendered with rhythm and a field note rewritten to flatter your theory.

Then comes the turn: “to imagine your facts.” The phrase lands like a reprimand because it describes a temptation that’s perennially modern. When facts are imagined, the mind doesn’t illuminate reality; it manufactures it. Burroughs is warning against the narrative impulse becoming a bulldozer, smoothing inconvenient evidence into a story that feels right. The subtext is ethical: creativity is not the problem; unearned certainty is.

Context matters. Writing in an era when Darwin’s ideas were roiling public thought and when popular nature writing often slid into moral fable, Burroughs positioned himself against sentimental natural history and, later, against writers accused of inventing wildlife anecdotes. His line reads as a defense of disciplined wonder: you can make facts sing, but you don’t get to replace them with melody.

It also works as a cultural diagnostic. We live amid “content” incentives that reward the most shareable arc, not the sturdiest account. Burroughs offers a simple test: are you decorating the truth, or drafting it from scratch?